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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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If you care about your family, then you probably don't want your kids to grow up to marry their siblings or cousins. You want them to marry members of different families. Loving your family necessarily implies that you want your grandchildren to have fewer of your genes than your children, and for your great-grand-children to have fewer of your genes than your grandchildren. The long term health of your bloodline depends on it being mixed with other bloodlines. Trying to keep your bloodline unchanged for generations is a profoundly bad idea. Also, it's probably impossible without significant coercion. People generally don't want to marry their family members unless they are forced to do so.

Genetic problems from incestuous relations is a problem. There is no comparable problem for people of one culture interacting with people from that same culture.

If your ancestors had been effective at doing this, your culture wouldn't exist.

And I'd probably care about whatever culture I would have ended up having. Just like if I was born into a different family, I would care about the family I was born into and not the one I have in the reality we live in.

At this point, I am convinced this conversation with you is not worth my time, sorry.

Genetic problems from incestuous relations is a problem. There is no comparable problem for people of one culture interacting with people from that same culture.

I don't know. The physical problem with sustained inbreeding is the pathologies that occur when recessive genes with the same harmful mutation are paired together, and low genetic diversity in a group makes it more vulnerable to pathogens and less flexible when conditions changes. It's not absurd to make an analogy with cultural and social diversity. If people get all their memes from the same metaphorically-inbred pool than deleterious memes are harder to identify and lose, and it becomes harder to generate new ones. A society with low cultural and intellectual diversity would allow viral memes to spread more easily, would be very vulerable to social pathologies that different societies could avoid, and would have fewer resources to deal with changes in circumstances.

And I'd probably care about whatever culture I would have ended up having. Just like if I was born into a different family, I would care about the family I was born into and not the one I have in the reality we live in.

At this point it seems you are conceding there's nothing special about your culture that makes it intrinsically worth preserving. You're just saying "it happens to be my culture by chance, therefore I want to preserve it" (why this conclusion follows from this premise is left as an exercise for the reader).

Even I wouldn't concede that there's nothing valuable about my own culture. There are a number of things about my culture that I find valuable, that I intend to pass on to my children, and that I hope they will continue to pass on as long as those things remain valuable in the ever-changing world my descendants will inhabit. I get the impression that I actually value and care about my own culture far more than you do, I just don't feel any need to keep it "pure" and unmixed with other valuable things from other cultures.

At this point, I am convinced this conversation with you is not worth my time, sorry.

Fair enough. Have a nice day.